*
VICTORIAN SURVIVAL. The great church architect Sir Ninian Comper was a pupil of Bodley.His early work is mostly late Gothic, more gorgeously treated in colour of glass, hangings and painted woodwork than was that of his master.St. Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate, Baker Street, London, 1900 [40], is an example of his earlier style. He builds his churches as “a lantern for the altar” and intends them to bring the visitor, as he enters them, to his knees. He obtains his effects by plan, colour and above all a sure sense of proportion. St. Philip’s, Cosham [41] is a 1937 building shewing his development and what might have been the development, had they survived, of the great Victorian church-builders. The altar is brought out into the middle of the church so that a congregation may join in worship from three sides. It is still the central flame of the lantern, under its golden baldachino. Classic and Gothic are welded together in the church itself. It is the end of the battle of Gothic and Classic, “inclusion by unity” as Comper calls it. The late A. Randall Wells, the late F. C. Eden and the late Martin Travers, who was a pupil of Comper, and T. Lawrence Dale, Frederick Etchells, F.R.I.B.A., and R. Blacking are among the stalwarts of this tradition of good craftsmanship.
37 Design for “A West End Club House”, by Beresford Pite, 1882
38 The Hill House, Helensburgh, 1906, by C. R. Mackintosh
39 Design for a Market Hall, 1901, by C. H. Holden
40 St. Cyprian’s, Baker Street, 1900, by Sir Ninian Comper
41 St. Philip’s, Cosham, 1937, by Sir Ninian Comper
13 THREE CHURCHES BLISLAND, CORNWALL
CHURCH CRAWLING is the richest of pleasures, it leads you to the remotest and quietest country, it introduces you to the history of England in stone and wood and glass which is always truer than what you read in books.It was through looking at churches that I came to believe in the reason why churches were built and why, despite neglect and contempt, innovation and business bishops, they still survive and continue to grow and prosper, especially in our industrial towns.
Of all the country churches of the West I have seen I think the Church of St. Protus and St. Hyacinth, Blisland, in Cornwall, is the most beautiful. I was a boy when I first saw it, thirty or more years ago. I shall never forget that first visit—bicycling to the inland and unvisited parts of Cornwall from my home by the sea. The trees at home were few and thin, sliced and leaning away from the fierce Atlantic gales, the walls of the high Cornish hedges were made of slate stuffed in between with fern and stone crop and the pulpy green triangles of mesembreanthemum, sea vegetation of a windy sea coast country. On a morning after a storm, blown yellow spume from Atlantic rollers would be trembling in the wind on inland fields. Then, as huge hill followed huge hill and I sweated as I pushed my bicycle up and heart-in-mouth went swirling down into the next valley, the hedges became higher, the lanes ran down ravines, the plants seemed lusher, the thin Cornish elms seemed bigger and the slate houses and slate hedges gave place to granite ones.I was on the edge of Bodmin Moor, that sweet brown home of Celtic saints, that haunted, thrilling land so full of ghosts of ancient peoples whose hut circles, beehive dwellings and burial mounds jut out above the ling and heather. Great wooded valleys, white below the trees with wood anemones or blue with bluebells, form a border fence on this, the western side of Bodmin Moor.
Perched on the hill above the woods stands Blisland village. It has not one ugly building in it and, which is unusual in Cornwall, the houses are round a green. Between the lichen-crested trunks of elm and ash that grow on the green, you can see everywhere the beautiful moorland granite. It is used for windows, for chimney stacks, for walls. One old house has gable ends carved in it. They are sixteenth or seventeenth century and curl round like swiss rolls. The church is down a steep slope of graveyard, past slate headstones and it looks over the tree tops of a deep and elmy valley and away to the west where, like a silver shield, the Atlantic shines. An opening in the churchyard circle shows a fuchsia hedge and the Vicarage front door beyond. The tower is square and weathered and made of enormous blocks of this moorland granite, each block as big as a chest of drawers. When I first saw it, the tower was stuffed with moss and with plants which had Vested here and there between the great stones. But lately it has been most vilely repointed in hard straight lines with cement. The church itself which seems to lean this way and that, throws out chapels and aisles in all directions. It hangs on the hillside, spotted with lichens which have even softened the slates of its roof. Granite forms the tracery of its windows, there is a granite holy-water stoup in the porch.
The whitewashed porch, the flapping notices, the door! That first thrill of turning the
